Matt Coneybeare

All Work and No Play Makes Coneybeare a Dull Boy

My landlord has been doing construction on my building for about 3 months now and it is driving me nuts! I don’t think I am being too sensitive or unreasonable when I say my living experience has turned horribly bad. Having been in the construction field, I am no stranger to construction noises and normal decibel levels. With confidence I can say that these guys are working much louder than the noise normal construction creates. Every morning at 7 AM I am awaken by constant banging and machinery noise.

I know what you are thinking… maybe he is just a light sleeper. BS. I live with a window facing a busy street and sleep with the window open. This NEVER wakes me up. I sometimes even sleep through my alarm. This construction noise is so loud that it wakes me up THROUGH EARPLUGS! That’s right, I wear earplugs to sleep and the banging still wakes me. The day they stop construction I will sleep till noon because I won’t be able to hear my alarm clock.

The crews are doing seismic renovations because I live in a 100 year old building and they are afraid it might collapse. I am grateful for this but it is driving me nuts. My apartment is situated directly on top of where they are doing the work and they are installing steel beams inches below my floor (literally). They must be banging them into place really hard because I can FEEL the work as well. Think I am lying?… I have a rain stick that is leaning up in a corner of my living room. When the crew works and starts banging around THE RAIN STICK STARTS TO MAKE NOISE. That’s right, the vibration is sufficient enough to jostle beads inside the rainstick.

When they first started working, they would start at 5AM, then 6AM, but I was not going to allow that! I know the city’s noise ordinance over construction noise… strictly 7AM-10PM only. I called the police and got them in trouble and now I think they have a vendetta against me. This police incident also stirred up a memo from the landlord letting the tenants know that we should expect early morning deliveries and work. I circulated a newsletter of my own to the tenants telling them that the law is there for a reason and that they should call the police if work begins before 7. This got me a call from the head of the management company, in which he promised the noise would cease soon and that work would not begin before 7.

Anyway, I just needed to vent how crazy this whole ordeal is making me. I really feel bad for my neighbors who might be in school this semester, especially with finals around the corner. To make matters worse, there is intermittent construction at my office too :(

Somehow even with the little sleep I am getting, I was able to setup my new blog, code.coneybeare.net. It is nearly identical to this blog (except black) and is used as an outlet to my technical side that the reader of this blog might not want to read.

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My name is Matt Coneybeare, I design and develop for iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), Mac OS X and the Web out of New York.
In 2008 I started a software company called Urban Apps that has made some pretty popular apps such as
Ambiance and Hourly News.
My current Stack Overflow reputation is about 27k.